Conway Waddington

The rise of the Private Military Industry has been cemented in modern global political reality, but where next will this multi-billion dollar industry go and what form will it take after the market boom of Iraq? Post-Colonial Africa is considered the birthplace of the modern mercenary and historically features prominently as a testament to the potential for immoral privately sponsored military activities within unstable states. Moreover, it is a rich market that the Private Military Industry is increasingly turning its attention to, albeit focussing on support functions for now, but a massive industry with a competitive and poorly regulated market environment will invariably begin to explore different avenues as competition grows. With market diversification grows the ethical risk of abuse. At the same time, peacekeeping efforts across the continent are hampered by numerous factors, not least of all a chronic lack of trained personnel. Could the legal and political legitimacy, not to mention the sustainable market environment sought by the PMI potentially exist in multilaterally sanctioned, privatised peacekeeping and peace support operations in Africa? Can the ethical challenges of mercenarism be suspended or even bypassed for the sake of expedient intervention in potential genocides, or be perhaps pragmatically accepted as an inevitable development that should be embraced rather than condemned, for strategic security reasons? Can the ethical condemnation of the proposed means of peace support be overridden by the potential ends generated by such a move? Is the world ready for privatised peacekeepers? This dissertation explores the ethical background to the privatisation of military operations and how these foreign policy trends and social perceptions of control of force impact on the notion of privatised peacekeeping, particularly in the context of operations in Africa. It investigates the philosophical implications of privatised peacekeeping by way of a constrained pragmatic form of consequentialist evaluation that warns against reckless expediency. Ultimately, this dissertation offers a more philosophically suitable argument to justify and control this seemingly inevitable next step in the trend of privatisation of force.

This paper suggests that certain characteristics of resourcerelated conflict reveal areas of contemporary Just War Theory that are insufficiently rigorous or robust in their current form. Water security in particular, reveals ambiguity in the Just War framework’s treatment of the jus ad bellum criteria of ‘just cause,’ which in turn challenges the credibility of the entire system. The insufficiency that is exposed has consequences for the effectiveness and cogency of the bodies of international law and global community, which are fundamentally based, and function according to, this predominantly Western moral framework. Key problem areas relating to flexible notions of ‘aggression,’ coincide with a persistent dilemma of simultaneously advocating responsibility to a global community while maintaining sovereign rights and security. Focusing on the ‘just cause’ criteria, justification for acts of war over certain resources is evaluated. Worryingly, the same powerful strategic reasons that might motivate a state to engage in what would otherwise be labelled a ‘realist’ war over certain resources, appear to gain moral merit through interpretation of the jus ad bellum in the specific case of water security, while argument against military action appears increasingly absolutist and impractical. The aim here then is to show the vulnerability of a dangerous prescriptive void in the Just War framework itself. Central to this is the question of the moral weight and significance, if any, of vital resources, as defined by strategic and humanitarian necessity.